Remember how your mom used to watch you from a distance to see if you could handle the world on your own? On a naked incline of ochre soil at the lip of a Carpathian forest, two bear cubs stall like unfinished sentences, their small bodies trembling with the arithmetic of gravity. Above them, the mother stands half veiled between fir trunks, a dark punctuation mark in the green cathedral, pretending indifference while measuring their resolve with the ancient patience of the mountains. The earth